Main Takeaways:
- What global warming does mean: global warming occurs when the average global temperature increases over long time periods of decades or more.
- What global warming does not mean: global warming is not a ‘uniform’ warming across every region on Earth – instead, for a given time period of overall warming, some places will be colder or warmer than the global average.
- The role of carbon dioxide (CO2) in global warming: Scientific evidence clearly shows that rising CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere have been the driving force behind recent global warming, trapping excess heat through the greenhouse effect.
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Also important to remember that the average temperature doesn’t say anything of the extremes that may occur. There can still be extreme cold that gets balanced out by extreme heat at another time. For example, the average climate data for cities like Paris or Valencia won’t give any indication of the increasingly extreme temperatures and drought-flood cycles that occur in these places. It may seem counter-intuitive, but in a rapidly warming world, the equatorial rainforest regions (at moderate elevation) are probably the safest places to be, as the climate close to the equator is relatively stable and doesn’t see such extremes.